Coronation Street star tackles male suicide in theatre show inspired by friend's tragic death

Empty cans of Stella litter the stage, but Danny finds one unopened and drains it as he carries on his monologue, stepping over building debris and trapped by two unfinished walls.

"I’m plastering stock, you see," he tells the audience, mixing plaster. "Building royalty. Dad's a spread. Granddad was a spread an' all six of his brothers, barring one who was a chef, and everyone said he w'posh.

"So, it's fair to say that when it comes to this shit, it's in me blood."

Across the ARC Theatre in Stockton-on-Tees there is a ripple of recognition from the 'pay-what-you-can' audience, on the opening night of 'RUM, a blistering new play about masculinity and male suicide, violence and vulnerability.

A surprise hit of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, this is Adolescence for the generation before Andrew Tate. By the end, the eyes of more than one coal-built Teeside man are filled with emotion, as the darkest consequences of not being able to express feelings are played out.

Danny is not just finishing the job his workmate left unfinished, he is supposed to be writing the speech for his best mate’s funeral. Jase has taken his own life – and Danny is in danger of wasting his in a haze of cocaine, punch-ups and childhood memories he is trying to force down with cheap lager.

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"In 2021, I lost my mate Dillon," says former Coronation Street actor Joe Mallalieu, who wrote the play and holds the stage as Danny. "Dillon took his life. I keep thinking, 'was that moment him trying to say something to me?' Writing this was the thing that saved me."

'Rum' has a deep resonance in Teeside, which has long battled the unwanted label of 'suicide capital of the UK' – a place where 75 per cent of those taking their own lives are men. In the hope the play can provoke fresh conversations, Max Emmerson Productions has partnered with the charity Andy’s Man Club which sees thousands of men chat over a brew on Monday nights in 270 towns and cities right across the UK.

The only rule of Andy's Man Club is ‘it’s okay to talk'.

"I met Dillon when I was 12," Joe, 33, says. "He joined me and my mates I’d known since I was five. When we were about 14, Dillon was fostered. We never really thought about why. We all stayed mates, we were each other’s best men and godfathers.

"Dillon used to get into fights. Sometimes being hard is all you have got, and Dillon got known as someone who never backed down. Not being able to be scared must be so bad.

"It happened during lockdown. He’d got in trouble with the police, and he was afraid of going to prison.

"When he took his life, he’d been on a bender. We’d been out a few days before, there’s a video of us singing Oasis, that’s why I put Oasis in the play. He was 28."

Joe looks away. "I’m not writing to Dillon," he says, eventually. "I'm writing to lads. I’m not trying to write about building sites, that's just the trade I know – I'm writing to my class. The ones who are really struggling. Feeling stuck. Feeling like we’re getting left behind.

"It’s hard to speak about this from any background, but it’s especially hard from a working-class background.

"The building trade is the worst for suicide. I remember being on a site wearing a harness and they said to me, the last person that wore that isn’t here anymore.

"Drugs are such a huge part of the building industry. Paid on Friday, skint on Sunday. What happened to all the other bits that used to be part of working-class culture, the music and the pigeon lofts?

"I really wanted to say something with this about how we’re struggling and why we're struggling – and how we could struggle a bit less if we were able to say a little bit more."

The battle is not just for working class communities to speak, it’s to be heard, Joe says.

"My experience is that the people who commission drama have never wanted working class less," he says.

At 16, Joe began a different path from his peers when he beat thousands of school pupils across the UK to land one of eight places on BBC reality documentary Mission Beach, where he trained as a 'Baywatch' lifeguard. At 24, he won a place at drama school, training at the former Academy of Live and Recorded Arts (ALRA).

In 2018, he appeared in Coronation Street as Cormac Truman, the son of the drug-dealing Ronan Truman, with a dramatic overdose storyline. Stints on stage and soap followed, but in between, he always went back to plastering, the trade he’d learned as a kid from his father and grandfather. He was plastering royalty after all.

"Being a working class actor, I was always the drug dealer or the person who dies of the drug overdose," Joe says. "So, I wanted Danny to be more than that. So much writing for TV and theatre sees us as two-dimensional characters. I wanted to write something that’s more accurate to where I’m from.

"I started going to acting when I was in a behaviour support unit. I'd been excluded from school for fighting many times. People used to come to my house in the evening and ask for a fight.

"When I got a scholarship to acting college, I nearly didn’t go. We didn’t have the money to get to London, and you hear all these stories of people who had to change their accents."

At acting school, Joe started reading more. "When I read The Grapes of Wrath it changed my life. I was always writing, but I didn’t connect it. I’d always known plastering was this amazing metaphor and that lots of things about building are really beautiful. Imagine saying that on a building site?

"Plaster cracks really easily. Things are always moving. Sites are full of stories. The story of Rum is Danny plastering over the cracks, but they just keep showing back through."

For some of the men in the Stockton audience on opening night, it was their first time in a theatre. For others, it was the first time they’d seen themselves represented, by the paint, plaster and blood-spattered Danny.

"This spoke true to me today," a man wearing an Andy’s Man Club shirt tells Joe after the show. "We plaster over the cracks, we all wear a mask. We don’t know how to ask for help."

Joe nods. "It’s scary to take the mask off," he says. "I'm still putting one on. Try doing a play and then going back on a building site."

He laughs, then shakes his head. "Male suicide is as high as it is because of all the years these stories haven’t been important. And that’s what I’m trying to change."

Suicide Prevention UK 24/7 helpline: 0800 6895652
‘RUM’ tours the UK until 28 June. See www.maxemmersonproductions.com